Alexander leaped straight into the center of the roiling horde, his entire array of newly acquired skills flaring to life simultaneously. Anger, Adrenaline, Muscle, Bone, Wind, Ice, Fatigue, Sight, and Necrotic Mana all pulsed through his awakening soul core. He tore through the outer perimeter of Normal-rankers with raw, sloppy punches. He was by no means a trained boxer, but he found an intensely primal satisfaction in the sickening crunch of the grasshoppers' exoskeletons collapsing under his fists.
As the swarm threatened to overwhelm him, a lethal spark of ingenuity struck. Utilizing the synergy between his Muscle and Bone skills, he forced his arms to stretch and harden at will. He rapidly expanded this biological manipulation, spreading the combination from his knuckles down across his entire forearms. The gathered mana shifted responsively; slowly, the dark, swirling energy coating his skin compressed, forming a razor-sharp physical edge. The wicked, elongated blade was heavily loaded with localized Necrotic Mana, stretching effortlessly as his limbs extended.
The turbulent Wind mana bonded perfectly with the jagged ice crystals from his frost skill and the corrosive rot of his necrotic energy. Every sweeping slash of his elongated arms claimed tens of insects at a time, while the kinetic wind blades throwing themselves outward from his arcs cleaved through the back ranks. It took barely a minute of calculated, frantic violence for nearly two hundred Normal-rank beasts to fall down dead, their bodies dissolving into ash.
Then, the spatial pressure shifted as three high-tier Soldier-rank grasshoppers lunged at him.
Alexander wasn't about to gamble with his life. He reached out and drew his conceptual cutlass, his physical right arm and subconscious mind molding seamlessly around the hilt. The moment his grip tightened, a dark, low whisper echoed directly from the blade into his psyche:
'Kill.'
He tried to force the intrusive thought down, gritting his teeth as he brought the blade down, cleanly lopping off the head of the first approaching Soldier-ranker.
'Kill,' the voice hissed again, louder this time, growing ravenously hungry for the life force of the slaughtered horde.
Slowly, the remaining Normal-rankers perished under the relentless onslaught, leaving the final seven Soldier-rank beasts to rally and fly at him with everything they had. These specimens sat at the absolute pinnacle of the Soldier tier—if they possessed true mortal souls, they would be less than twenty kills away from breaking through to the Commander rank. The insects flew at him with a terrifying, coordinated cunning, successfully severing his limbs multiple times in mid-air. Yet, Alexander's anomalous body simply pulled itself back together upon contact; his Healing Mana allowed him to subconsciously concentrate his cellular regeneration at the exact points of trauma.
Further up the leaf, Reina was not having an easy time either. She was currently anchoring the vanguard against five massive Commander-rank beasts. Two of them sat at the absolute pinnacle of their tier, while the largest was just a single grain of salt away from ascending to the Noble Rank. Reina's hands shivered violently as she countered their massive, jagged claws with her sword and dagger. Close-quarters combat was entirely outside her comfort zone as a caster, but her sheer survival instincts allowed her to parry the lethal strikes.
Desperate for breathing room, she threw her hands down, pulling up a thick wall of frost to momentarily freeze their momentum. Seizing the vital microsecond, she retrieved her tactical shotgun. The moment the first two grasshoppers shattered through the ice wall, she fired twice in rapid succession. One beast dropped instantly with its chest caved in, while the second stumbled back, losing almost half of its head to the blast.
Meanwhile, Alexander was being tossed around like a ragdoll. The remaining insects kicked at him violently, trying to gouge him with their scythe-like claws. He ducked, rolled, and countered as best as he could, but over the last five minutes of brutal bullying, he had only managed to systematically execute a single Soldier-ranker due to the sheer velocity of their synchronized attacks. Fortunately, his strategy was already paying dividends; every time his blades clipped them, the applied Necrotic Mana stayed behind, slowly eating away at their carapaces from the inside out.
"They're both structurally struggling," Ketovan observed from the adjacent branch, his grip tightening on his sword as he watched the chaotic leaf. "Alexander's struggle I can fully understand given his lack of experience, but why is Reina falling behind?"
"Reina is a pure mage," Hakon explained, never breaking his watch. "Mages—except for a few incredibly talented, frontline bastards—are designed to be far more useful in coordinated groups than in isolated individual duels. Casters and supports are fundamentally dependent on a frontline vanguard to buy them the necessary casting windows to cycle their high-tier spells and buffs. Right now, Reina can't risk a long incantation. She's restricting her entire arsenal, only deploying her most cost-efficient, instant-cast skills to survive."
Franklin sighed, crossing his arms. "Alexander needs a massive amount of technical training; his lack of martial skill is a gaping liability. Once we clear this primary branch, the baseline number of Normal-rankers per leaf is going to climb into the thousands. By the time we reach the end of the twentieth branch, those numbers will scale into the hundreds of thousands. Can his current capacity handle a swarm of that magnitude?"
"We can always just step in and wipe the leaf ourselves if it comes to that," Hakon muttered, his eyes narrowing as he watched Alexander drop down to his last two Soldier-rank opponents. "A coordinated team game might be our best bet moving forward. We can let Alexander face a few hundred controlled beasts to farm his levels, but the moment the Noble-rank variants start popping up down there, it's going to become mathematically difficult to keep him safe."
"So what's the play?" Ketovan asked, his tone laced with urgency. "We can't just let him lose out on these vital levels. If we play our cards right, he could comfortably reach the Soldier Rank by the end of the twentieth branch. But if the numbers scale too fast, Reina will be forced to spend all her mana clearing the screen. Should we send them back to the transit arrays?"
"Maybe we could outfit him with a Suppressor?" Franklin proposed, tapping his chin. "A high-grade artifact with an inbuilt kinetic shield. It would guarantee his physical safety, though it will greatly cut his experience gain down by a fraction of a hundred."
"What? A hundred?" Ketovan snapped, turning on Franklin. "He would need to slaughter ten thousand high-tier beasts just to gain a single level? Are you out of your mind? That's literally a loss of a hundred natural levels! He could reach the Soldier Rank on a total cakewalk with the raw kills available on this tree, and you want to throttle his growth?"
"The Noble-rank variants are going to manifest soon," Hakon said, cutting off the argument. "As we descend deeper into the lower branches, the density piles up exponentially. The lower leaves will host millions of beasts simultaneously. He will reach the Soldier Rank by the time this entire tree falls, but the process will be slow, grueling, and profoundly tiring. That kind of exhausting pressure can make a warrior ferocious. But looking at him... I still have one fundamental doubt."
"What's that?" Ketovan asked, his eyes locked on Alexander, who was currently engaging the strongest of the Soldier-rank insects amidst a lingering sea of a hundred re-routed Normals.
"Why is he doing any of this?" Hakon mused quietly. "Is it for raw power? Wealth? Political influence across Eternis? Or is he just desperately trying to accumulate enough cosmic strength to force a way back to his original world? What is driving him to throw himself into this meat grinder? What is his goal?"
Before anyone could answer, Alexander took a massive, staggering hit to his ribs.
Spitting out a mouthful of blood, he spun around, desperately trying to map a path toward Reina now that his immediate sector of Soldier-rankers and Normals had finally been ground to dust. But the situation had deteriorated rapidly. The final three Commander-rank beasts boxing Reina in were no longer generic types; they were highly specialized elemental variants.
The two slightly weaker variants were rapidly spewing highly corrosive venom bullets from their mandibles, pinning Reina down, while the largest, apex Commander stood at the rear with its long, segmented arms outstretched, actively casting a high-tier spell.
The sheer ambient mana gathering around that spell caused Alexander's instincts to violently seize. For the first time since entering this warped space, an overwhelming wave of genuine, primal terror flooded his mind.
His brain was screaming at him to run—warning him that whatever magic was finalizing in that insect's core possessed the specialized output required to permanently bypass his Omniarch defenses and obliterate his soul. But as the casting cycle neared its apex and he saw Reina completely pinned, unable to dodge the incoming strike, Alexander threw his fractured arms forward. He unleashed a massive, desperate gush of compressed wind—a localized sonic cannon—straight at the casting beast.
The concussive blast struck the Commander squarely in the chest, but the massive creature barely flinched. Instead, its large, compound eyes slowly pivoted, locking its terrifying, malicious gaze directly onto Alexander.
The spell fired.
Time seemed to slow to an absolute crawl. Both Reina and Alexander watched the incoming beam of localized destruction arc across the leaf, both believing with absolute certainty that this was the end of her life.
But a microsecond before impact, a brilliant, interlocking sphere of divine energy materialized out of thin air around Reina's body. The incoming spell slammed into the barrier, its catastrophic force dissolving into harmless sparks against the shield with absolute ease.
Before the horde could even process the disruption, the two venom-spewing Commander grasshoppers flanking Reina suddenly stiffened. In a single, seamless blur of motion, their massive heads were cleanly severed from their bodies, tumbling onto the leaf as a towering figure wielding a massive, glowing blue greatsword appeared beside her.
The vibrant purple and regal gold colors of the Church of Hegemon's official vanguard uniform glowed with a terrifying, radiant light. A cascade of high-tier, divine status boosts violently engulfed the man's frame as his eyes flared into a burning, apocalyptic red, and the ancient, intricate veins around his temples began to pulsate with raw, conceptual power.
***